Wmi

Well, since our current solution for mapping printers is an ugly batch file, which needs to be put into Startup, I today poked at doing it in VBscript (I know, but it’s less ugly than the batch script, trust me). As some of you know, printers are only applicable to users (as in you can’t put a startup script onto an OU, which is going to map the printers). So as we store users and the computes in different OU’s in our Active Directory (we do have about 15.000 students), I can’t apply the printer.vbs to the users OU directly either, unless I implement some intelligence into the script itself. ...

As I wrote on Thursday, I am battling with Windows Server 2003. Now I got a list out of our change management database, which sadly ain’t that accurate. So in order to get reliable information about the target systems (in order to do some accurate planning), I ended up writing a small vbscript which simply takes the hostname on the command line (cscript //NoLogo win_sp_level.vbs 10.0.0.5) and returns a csv-like element. ...

On all our servers in the basement, we do have bginfo installed, in order to quickly get certain information. Now as I was struggling with a big Service Pack roll out, I looked into making bginfo also display the OS architecture. But apparently it isn’t that easy … At least bginfo doesn’t provide it by default. After (yet another hour in front of Google), I finally found what I was looking for. At first I didn’t limit the query on a specific CPU, but that turned out to be shitty (x32 being displayed twice, once for each CPU). But after limiting it to DeviceID=‘CPU0’ it works like a charm 😉

After some more crunching on my VBscript, I think I finally have a working script that runs through a csv-list I point it to and walk onto each system (by ip-address only sadly) and query the os and the Service Pack that is installed. The CSV may look like this: 1 2 3 Hostname;IP;Model;Description;OS;Service-Pack;BL;Priority epimetheus;10.0.0.2;VMware guest;File-Server hades;10.0.0.1;VMware guest;Core-Router After saving that one, and running a cscript //NoLogo win_sp_level.vbs you should find a completed list like this: ...

As I posted earlier, I tried working around some limitations in Microsoft’s Active Directory by teaching the script some intelligence. But, since we recently started using Thin Clients, all the stuff I did with the fancy vbs was just a waste-of-time. Turns out, Windows XP Embedded doesn’t work quite the same as a " normal" Windows XP (that’s where I tested the script on), and it simply dies when running the WMI Query. Bollocks. ...